Sebelius: Administration Never Set 7 Million ACA Enrollment Goal – CBO Did

(CNSNews.com) – Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Tuesday dismissed the goal of 7 million Obamacare enrollees by the end of March as something that the Congressional Budget Office made up.

 “First of all, 7 million was not the administration. That was a CBO Congressional Budget Office prediction when the bill was first signed. I’m not quite sure where they even got their numbers. Their number’s all over the board, and the vice president has looked and said it may be closer to 5 to 6,” Sebelius told HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill.

Hill asked if she agreed with Vice President Joe Biden’s statement that 5.6 million Americans enrolled by the end of March would be a good start.

“We may not get to seven million, we may get to five or six, but that's a hell of a start," Biden admitted last week on his way to a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Minneapolis, according to a pool report of his meeting, Reuters reported.

Despite her insistence that the CBO made up the 7 million enrollees number, as CNSNews.com previously reported, Sebelius told NBC News on Sept. 30, 2013, that "success," in her opinion, would be having 7 million Americans enrolled in the Obamacare exchanges by the end of March.

"I think success looks like at least 7 million people having signed up by the end of March 2014," Sebelius told NBC's Nancy Snyderman.

Meanwhile, the CBO predicted in May 2013 that by 2023, the Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of uninsured by 25 million, “leaving 31 million uninsured.”

“In our current projections for 2023, the ACA reduces the number of people without health insurance by 25 million, leaving 31 million uninsured (compared with 30 million in our February estimate),” the CBO reported.

Via: CNS News

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Feds Release Details of ‘Urgent’ New Healthcare.gov Contract

Newly released documents reveal the anxieties of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about Healthcare.gov, which warn that failure to finish the website puts “the entire health insurance industry at risk.”

The HHS released documents relating to its new contract to maintain the federal health exchange on Wednesday, justifying its reasons to expedite the procurement process because of an “urgent need” for the website to work.

The documents instruct the new contractor, Accenture Federal Services, to build “core functionality” of the website, including software that tracks enrollment and calculates subsidies to pay insurance companies. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) officials have admitted that nearly half of the site has yet to be built.

CMS officials said the majority of work remains to be done on back end systems, including the financial management module, which will automate and smooth intersections with third parties including health plans.

HHS warned that if the site is not completed by March 2014, it puts the “entire health insurance industry at risk.”

“CMS must immediately award a contract for these services under the auspices of the aforementioned exception to full and open competition because there is limited time to build this functionality and failure to deliver the functionality above by mid-March 2014 will result in financial harm to the Government,” the “Justification for Other than Full and Open Competition” statement accompanying the contract revealed.

“If this functionality is not complete by mid-March 2014, the government could make erroneous payments to providers and insurers,” it said.

Via: WFB

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OBAMACARE TRANSPARENCY BILL SET FOR FRIDAY VOTE

Growing questions about President Barack Obama and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's mismanagement of the unpopularObamacare program have prompted a House vote this Friday on a pivotal bill that would provide greater transparency by requiring weekly HHS reports on the status of HealthCare.gov.

The Exchange Information Disclosure Act (H.R. 3362) would require Sebelius to regularly report the number of paying Obamacare enrollees, Healthcare.gov metrics, Medicaid enrollments, and basic demographic data to monitor Obamacare's problems and viability. Senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Rep. Lee Terry(R-NE) authored the bill.

"This is about practicality, not politics," said Terry. "The American people have a right to know what's happening with their health care coverage."

Committee vice chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) agrees. "It's well past time the administration be transparent and upfront with the American people." 

Friday's vote on the measure comes as management experts, government watchdog groups, and members of Congress raise serious questions about Obamacare's calamitous implementation. Politico reported last week that several management experts blasted Obama and Sebelius for their lack of executive management and oversight during the three-and-a-half years leading up to Obamacare's disastrous unveiling. 

"No one asked you to write code or be a technical expert," Kellogg School of Management professor Daniel Diermeier told Politico, "but the expectation is you can set up a process. Companies do it every day." 

A Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report featured by Politico made headlines when it revealed that the official White House calendar and the Politico presidential calendar record a single one-on-one meeting between Obama and Sebelius in the over three-and-a-half years leading up to the Oct. 1 Obamacare launch.

Via: Breitbart

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A Taxpayer Bailout for ObamaCare

An American public already reeling from the catastrophic rollout of ObamaCare will more than likely be hearing an unfamiliar term being bandied about in the new year. “Risk corridor” refers to a provision in the law that allows the government to “stabilize” premium costs for insurance companies during the first three years of the healthcare rollout.

If insurance companies’ “target” costs for providing healthcare has been miscalculated, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will intercede on their behalf. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer illuminates the nature of that intercession. “The insurers understand that they’re going to be completely ruined,” Krauthammer explains. “And what’s going to happen as a result of this? There’s only one way out, a huge government bailout of the insurers is waiting at the end of next year.” More accurately, it will be a taxpayer-funded bailout, similar to the ones given to the banks and the car companies.

Risk corridors were established to protect insurance companies that signed up too many sick people, relative to the number of healthy enrollees. They were part of asystem that also included two other concepts known as “reinsurance” and “risk adjustment.”

The reinsurance part of the equation initially compensated insurance companies for enrollees whose costs exceed $60,000 per year. For 2014, that compensation is funded by a $10 billion fund, fed by a $63 tax that has been levied on all healthcare plans. And while the program collects those taxes even from large employer-sponsored plans, payouts only help to underwrite the costs of individual and small-group plans.

Via: Canada Free Press

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Hiding the Hacking at HealthCare.gov

Christmas shoppers were stunned to learn last Thursday that computer hackers had made off with the names and other personal info of some 40 million Target customers. Some of the pilfered information is reportedly being sold on the black market, prompting JP Morgan Chase to limit purchases and cash withdrawals on debit cards owned by recent Target shoppers.

But at least Target informed its customers of the security breach, as it is required by federal law to do. HealthCare.gov faces no such requirement; it need never notify customers that their personal information has been hacked or possibly compromised. The Department of Health and Human Services was specifically asked to include a notification requirement in the rules it designed for the health-care exchanges, but HHS declined.

The Federal Register tells the tale about what happened on March 27, 2012, at a meeting on the issue.

At that meeting, two commenters asked HHS to ensure the exchanges would promptly notify affected enrollees in the event of a data breach or unauthorized access to the exchange’s databases. One commenter suggested that a full investigation be launched each time such a breach occurred, with the goal of holding hackers legally and financially accountable for breaking into the website.

Via: NRO

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Latest Obamacare Fixes Unnerve Insurance Industry on Deadline Day

The health insurance industry is uneasy over the Obama administration's announcement Thursday that individuals who lost existing coverage under the Affordable Care Act will not be obligated to purchase coverage by Monday.
 

Insurers were counting on these customers for their bottom line, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announcement said: "If you have been notified that your individual market policy will not be renewed, you will be eligible for a hardship exemption and will be able to enroll in [bare-bones] catastrophic coverage."

Monday, Dec. 23, is the last day to sign up through the Healthcare.Gov and state health exchanges for insurance coverage beginning Jan. 1. For the coverage to take effect, policyholders must pay their first premium directly to the insurer by Jan. 10, USA Today reported.

Consumers will have until March 31 to purchase coverage for 2014 without having to pay a penalty.

The insurance industry's chief Washington lobbyist, Karen Ignagni, is concerned that exempting people from having to be in the exchanges is an erosion of the "individual mandate" requiring Americans to have health insurance.

Thursday's HHS announcement "was of particular concern because we were worried about the message with respect to individuals having a path around the mandate; that was the first time that the administration had said anything like that," Ignagni told the Journal.

The industry had opposed the Affordable Care Act when it was first proposed. After it became law in 2010, Ignagni said insurers "mobilized our best people . . . to provide thoughtful advice."

Nearly 750,000 people had visited the federal HealthCare.gov site over the weekend through Sunday afternoon.

Via: Newsmax

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It's Official—HHS Says Obamacare Is a Hardship

The latest announcement from the Obama Administration has confirmed what so many Americans already know: Obamacare is a hardship.

With millions of reported insurance cancellations, unbalanced by just 400,000 sign-ups for coverage on the Administration’s excuse for a website, the White House is or should be in full panic mode. And issuing more government rules to correct the consequences of their unworkable government rules is the only thing they seem to know how to do.

Thus, the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary is now exercising her authority to grant a “hardship” exemption to the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. The Administration announced that those who have had their previous policies canceled will now qualify for a “temporary” hardship exemption (no exact time frame is given) from the individual mandate. Thus, as the law allows, those who get a “hardship exemption” are now able to purchase a catastrophic plan—typically only available to those under age 30. This is supposed to be beneficial because catastrophic plans have cheaper premiums, as Secretary Sebelius estimates, on average about 20 percent lower than other plans available on the exchange.

Under the Affordable Care Act, however, catastrophic plans have the highest deductibles allowed—$6,350 for self-only coverage—before the plan pays benefits. In addition,catastrophic plans are not eligible for subsidies in the exchanges.

The Administration’s latest action begs a crucial question: Is this a workable option for the people who had their coverage canceled? First, to qualify, of course, you must have had your policy canceled. You must also state that you found no other options “affordable.” Apparently, this means that no other plan was “affordable” despite the possibility of getting taxpayer subsidies for those other plans. Verification is going to be a challenge.

Via: The Foundry

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Feds fail to send records on 10,000 Iowa Medicaid applications

WE CAN'T GUARANTEE COVERAGE!!!

Although Obamacare’s first enrollment deadline is only days away, Obama administration officials still haven’t given Iowa administrators complete data for 10,000 low-income residents, potentially leaving them without coverage on Jan. 1.

The communication failure includes 7,400 applications to cover 10,400 people who were directed to low-income programs Medicaid and Hawk-I, an Iowa program to insure children.

While HealthCare.gov preliminarily determined the Iowans were eligible for these programs, in order to be enrolled state officials need to review and process the potential beneficiaries.

Information on the 10,000 is currently incomplete and with the deadline for coverage just days away, Iowa state officials are concerned that they won’t get the information in time.

“Federal officials have indicated that they will send more complete information by the end of the month, and then the state will begin making determinations,” Amy Lorentzen McCoy, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Human Services, told the Des Moines Register Thursday.

Once Iowa officials determine whether applicants are eligible and finish enrolling them, the affected consumers will be insured reaching back to January 1 retroactively. But, McCoy told the Register, “If someone needs to see a health care provider during this interim period, we can’t guarantee coverage.”

It’s not clear how accurate HealthCare.gov’s preliminary determinations were or what will happen to applicants if they weren’t.

The glitch comes as Iowa is rushing to implement the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which Republican Gov. Terry Branstad agreed to last week. Under Iowa’s version of the expansion the state will extend Medicaid coverage to those from 100 to 133 percent of the federal poverty line, but the state will charge this subset of consumers a premium, limited to 2 percent of their income or less.

Via: Daily Caller

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WHITE HOUSE DAMAGE CONTROL: OBAMACARE REPEAL WILL 'COST TOO MUCH'

Over the last several weeks the Obama White House has been executing a media blitz meant to sell Obamacare to the nation—again. As the final maneuver in that plan, the President is releasing several reports on how Obamacare will affect the states.

His message: repealing Obamacare will just be too expensive.

"These state reports mark the culmination of a multi-week effort by the White House and supporters of reform to bring a renewed refocus on each of these benefits and what the cost of repealing them would mean," a White House official told reporters at The Hill.

Obamacare supporters crafted these reports to foreground how repealing Obamacare will affect families in the various states. 

However, it is a bit hard to understand how repealing the Affordable Care Act could cost more than the millions that is being inefficiently spent to enroll single applicants. Early in November, for instance, it was discovered that the five Obamacare enrollees for the District of Columbia cost the taxpayers a hefty $26.7 million each. Other states have seen similar waste, one source estimating that the cost for all enrollees nationwide had been$14,000 each.

Then there are the millions doled out to left-wing groups to push Obamacare as "Navigators," specialists intended to herd citizens into the Obamacare exchanges. One such group was given $1.1 million to gather and publicize Obamacare "success stories." There are hundreds of such groups across the country acting, essentially, as government-funded Obamacare salesmen.

Via: Breitbart

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White House Continues To Dismantle Obamacare, “Temporarily” Suspend Individual Mandate For People Who Had Their Plans Cancelled…

Today, the Obama administration announced that people whose insurance plans were cancelled this year will “temporarily” be exempted from the individual mandate. Here’s how they’re doing it — and what it means for the law.

1. The individual mandate includes a “hardship exemption.” People who qualify can either ignore the individual mandate altogether or purchase a cheap, bare-bones catastrophic insurance plan that’s typically only available to people under age 30.

2. According to HHS, the exemption covers people who “experienced financial or domestic circumstances, including an unexpected natural or human-caused event, such that he or she had a significant, unexpected increase in essential expenses that prevented him or her from obtaining coverage under a qualified health plan.”

3. Today, the administration agreed with a group of senators, led by Mark Warner of Virginia, who argued that having your insurance plan canceled counted as “an unexpected natural or human-caused event.” For these people, in other words, Obamacare itself is the hardship. You can read Sebelius’s full letter here. HHS’s formal guidance is here.

Via: Washington Post

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Obama has shown how a future GOP president can gut Obamacare

 I owe Mitt Romney an apology.

During the 2012 Republican presidential primary season, I repeatedly criticized Romney — and personally challenged him during his editorial board meeting with the Washington Examiner — for promising that if elected, on day one of his presidency, he would grant Obamacare waivers to all 50 states.

As I reported, under the text of the law, the ability to offer waivers to states was subject to many restrictions and wouldn’t even be an option until 2017, four years after his hypothetical swearing in.

Though I still believe I was right about what the statute said, as it turns out, I was being old-fashioned by taking the letter of the law so literally.

Having watched President Obama and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius over the past several months unilaterally alter or outright ignore major portions of the law, I now believe that a future Republican president would have greater latitude to gut Obamacare than I once thought possible.

The changes instituted by the Obama administration in response to implementation snags have ranged from perfectly legal areas of administrative discretion stemming from the vast regulatory powers granted to the HHS secretary under Obamacare, to more creative interpretations of that discretion, to Obama simply choosing to ignore parts of the law that became inconvenient.

Obama has turned his signature legislative accomplishment into a constantly evolving wikilaw, with editing privileges restricted to himself and a few administration officials.

He’s largely been able to get away with it due to the difficulties posed by gaining standing in court for legal challenges.

Via: Washington Examiner

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Obamacare Insurance Workaround Reveals Law that Remains Unfinished, Unaccountable, and Unworkable

The latest tweak reveals how much of the health law's basic architecture is still incomplete.

In October, when it became clear that Obamacare's online enrollment system wasn't functioning, President Obama gave a speech in which he told people who wanted to sign up to contact call centers instead, or fill out pen and paper applications.

This week, the administration announced that it would be employing another manual workaround, this time for critical insurer payment systems. In this case, it's not because the payment system is broken. Instead, it’s because the part of the system that is supposed to both calculate how much money the government owes insurers in premium subsidy and cost-sharing payments and make the appropriate payments simply hasn't been built yet.

What hasn't been built can’t be used, but insurers need to be paid in order for the system to function. So the administration has decided to require insurers to estimate how much they are owed and submit payment requests manually. Later, after the systems are built, the plan is to sort out the details and figure out the exact amounts that should have been billed, then reconcile any differences.

Because it deals with the insurance industry side of the system, this temporary, technical tweak will probably garner far less attention than the ongoing problems with the consumer side of the federal exchange system. But the on-the-fly patch offers a revealing moment for the law all the same, one that highlights how unfinished, unaccountable, and unworkable the health law continues to be.

Via: Reason.com

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Next up: Obamacare worst-case scenario?

Enrollment surge or no enrollment surge, the next Obamacare challenge is a big one: How will the White House make sure all those people with canceled policies get new coverage by Jan. 1?

At the rate the signups are going — even with the speedier, newly functioning Obamacare website — the administration has a vast distance to travel before the estimated 4 to 5 million people with canceled policies get new health coverage.

In fact, health care experts say, it’s not out of the question that the Obama administration could face the worst-case scenario on Jan. 1: the number of uninsured Americans actually goes up.

(Also on POLITICO: White House aims to build on HealthCare.gov’s numbers)

That’s a long shot, and there are plenty of reasons why it might not happen, since there are other ways those people could replace their health coverage, like signing up directly with insurers. Not all of the policies will expire in December. And even if the ranks of the uninsured did increase, it could be such a brief event that no one would ever be able to confirm it.

But even with all the variables, one thing is for certain: the Obama administration has one seriously long road to travel from the signups it has now to the number who will likely need to replace their coverage. That’s a bad place to be, given that the point of the law was to cover more people, not fewer people.

Via: Politico

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Medicaid Is Latest Health-Site Victim

States Refuse to Sign Up Enrollees Due to Incomplete Information from HealthCare.gov

States are warning that they may not process Medicaid enrollments from people who have signed up for the health program through the troubled HealthCare.gov site, raising the prospect that several hundred thousand low-income people who thought they had obtained insurance actually may not have it.

The federal health-insurance site, which serves residents in 36 states, is designed to sell policies from private insurers. But some people who apply for coverage through the site discover they are eligible instead for Medicaid, the joint federal-state health-insurance program for the poor and disabled.

So far, the federal government has been unable to transfer full Medicaid applications to states, potentially leaving people who sought to sign up for Medicaid through HealthCare.gov without coverage.

In all, some 183,396 people who submitted coverage applications through HealthCare.gov were determined to be eligible for Medicaid through Nov. 2, according to data published by the Department of Health and Human Services. Many thousands more are believed to have received similar assessments in the month since then.

Via: Weasel Zippers

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ANALYSIS FINDS COST OF OBAMACARE WEBSITE IS WAY MORE THAN ANYONE PREDICTED

The to-date cost of the glitchy Obamacare website has topped $1 billion, easily surpassing the $394 million originally estimated by the Government Accountability Office, according to aBloomberg Government analysis.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (Getty Images)

It’s important to note that the Bloomberg analysis runs through Sept. 30, just before the 16-day partial government shutdown. So the final cost may be more than $1 billion.

Perhaps more shocking than the site’s likely price tag is the fact that roughly one-third of that amount was spent on contracts awarded in the six months leading up to the site’s disastrous Oct. 1 launch – when those at the top were reportedly aware of the site’s many problems.

“The torrent of late spending — almost $352 million of $1 billion in awards to the top 10 contractors — indicates the magnitude of the work still to be done as opening day approached,” Bloomberg’s Peter Gosselin reported, “and helps explain the information technology problems that have dogged the exchange system since its launch.”

The Bloomberg figure may come as a shock to many Americans. Indeed, despite the GAO stating clearly that its data was incomplete, the $394 million estimate has been widely reported as the official cost of the launch of the Affordable Care Act.

Via: The Blaze

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OBAMACARE SIGN UPS FALL 85% SHORT OF GOAL

Bloomberg puts the best spin possible on the number of November ObamaCare sign ups (these are not yet official enrollees who have paid their first month's premium) through the federal exchange that covers 36 states. But 100,000 is still dismal. Added together with the 27,000 October federal signs ups, and what you have is ObamaCare at only 15% of its two-month goal.

Thanks to RomneyCare, when the Administration set its two-month enrollment goal at 800,000 for the federal exchange, they did so knowing signs ups are slow in the early months. Still, after two months, the federal exchange is 85% short.

NBC's Chuck Todd reports that with the state exchanges, November ObamaCare sign ups totaled somewhere between 200,000 to 250,000.

If you are generous and assume the number is 250,000, and add that to October's 100,000 sign ups; with almost 40% of the enrollment period gone, ObamaCare is only at 5% of its ultimate goal of 7 million.

That 7 million number is not arbitrary. That is the number needed to make the program financially viable.

The distinction between "sign ups' and "enrolled" is important. Putting ObamaCare in your shopping cart is only the first step. Deciding to follow through from there with an actual payment is the only step that matters. The official enrollment number could fall far short of the sign up number.

Via: Breitbart

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